One of the main things I would like to achieve with my blog is to introduce you to authors and characters that you may not have heard of but might like to try and I hope I have done that already. Of course, I also want to know what you think of them and how they compare with the writers you already know and enjoy. In addition to that, though, I have already posted quite a lot of material on authors and characters I know many of you will be more familiar with. By doing that, I hope to introduce more readers to them but I also want to hear your views on them. So, in this post, I am going to talk about someone I know many of you will know very well, perhaps even more so than I suspect is the case with Lee Child and Jack Reacher.
Michael Connelly has been around the detective fiction genre almost as long as I can remember and his Harry (Hieronymous) Bosch stories were among the first American detective novels I picked up. I can’t remember where the introduction to Connelly and Harry came from although it might have been from my father. I’m pretty sure someone told me about them, though, because I didn’t find authors randomly or seek them out in those days. Of course, like so many of the authors I have discovered and read over the years, it doesn’t really matter how I found them, the important thing is that I did find them!
Starting with Harry Bosch, I think I mentioned in my introduction to the blog that one of the things I like about him is that we have grown old together! He is around seventy now and retired from the LAPD and Michael Connelly has allowed him to do that but still managed to come up with good plots and stories for him. There is a real similarity there with Ian Rankin and Rebus as Rankin has done the same thing and, as it happens, Bosch and Rebus are around the same age, retired and mainly trying their hand at solving cold cases that nobody else wants to get involved with.
To give a brief introduction, Harry Bosch is a Vietnam veteran and we get occasional references to his time ‘in the tunnels’. He then spent many years in the LAPD as a homicide detective and, like many other of our heroes, was generally pretty disdainful of authority. Long divorced from his wife, he has a daughter who is featuring increasingly in Connelly’s books and who is a student at Chapman University in Orange, California. Although he retired relatively recently, he was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the bureaucracy he was faced with in the force and pretty much left before he was pushed out. As a result of this, his voluntary involvement in cold and other cases is not always very well received until, of course, he manages to solve them successfully!
There are around twenty books featuring Harry Bosch on his own although we get to know the different partners and colleagues he has worked with over the years. I’ve read all of them, I think, and enjoyed them all although, as with so many of the authors I have written about, the stories can be a little formulaic and similar. With Michael Connelly as many others, though, it is the characters that really make the books work for me and that is absolutely the case with Harry Bosch. It may be that he will appeal to older rather than younger readers and I guess I have to accept that but he still comes highly recommended.
Following on from these comments, I have a feeling that Michael Connelly might have been thinking the same thing and wondering how he might revitalise the Bosch stories and I have to say to you that I think he has managed to do that brilliantly! He has introduced new characters over the years and given a few books to them. The detective, Terry McCaleb, who retired after his heart transplant, falls into that category as does the journalist, Jack McEvoy. If you like or find you like the Harry Bosch books, it is worth trying these and the books can be found via the links. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more featuring Jack as the most recent one ‘Fair Warning’ was pretty good (at least I thought so).
However, the reason I think that Michael Connelly was thinking about new directions with Harry goes back to 2005 when he published ‘The Lincoln Lawyer” which introduced a new character, the lawyer, Mickey Haller, and things have moved forward very successfully and interestingly since then! First of all, Mickey is a bit younger than Harry (we don’t know how much younger but Matthew McConaughey played him in the movie which came out in 2011, so that gives us a clue) and, not surprisingly since Harry is seventy, Mickey is a lot more dynamic. As many of you will know, Mickey is called the Lincoln Lawyer because he has no office but operates out of his Lincoln Town Car and his associates are his driver and a Hell’s Angel private investigator. All three are really interesting and appealing characters and, so far, the stories have been pretty outstanding as well!
So, what’s that got to do with making Harry Bosch more interesting? Well, in a much earlier Bosch novel, Harry mentions a half-brother and, lo and behold, in the second Haller book, The Brass Verdict, doesn’t Harry appear and it is revealed that he and Mickey are indeed half-brothers. After that, of course, both feature in the subsequent books and, so, the Harry Bosch series is revitalised.
However, that clearly wasn’t enough for Michael Connelly and, in 2017, ‘The Late Show’ was published which introduced us to LAPD detective Renee Ballard. Like Harry, she is a bit of a loner in the force and, although it takes a little time and the relationship is not always easy, they form an informal partnership with Harry assisting her on cases. Of course, there are the inevitable problems with authority but these are overcome with the successful solving of cases and, these days, we are seeing stories featuring Bosch and Ballard and Bosch and Haller rather than Harry on his own. It’s a really good new direction and I would recommend both of these new characters to you and, of course, the other Bosch books if you haven’t read them before.
One final thing worth mentioning is that there is a Bosch series on Netflix starring the actor Titus Welliver as Harry. I didn’t know Welliver although he was in Lost, Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy so he is a good friend of Netflix. He also looks a bit like James Nesbitt. There have been seven series and they follow the books, covering most of them. It is popular and I have heard people speaking very highly of it. However, I’m afraid that Titus Welliver doesn’t look anything like the picture I have of Harry Bosch in my mind so I haven’t really watched it. I probably prefer books anyway where I can imagine my own characters. I believe the current series is the last of its kind but there is speculation that any new series will feature Bosch and Haller. Now that appeals to me!